As soon as the passing of Areoye Oyebola, former Editor of the Daily Times, author, teacher and community leader, was made public Baba Lekki had gone into a protracted mourning mood lamenting the gradual disappearance of great men and genuine visionaries from this society. In his peculiar admixture of fact and fantasy, the old Alekuso contrarian had let it be known to anybody who cared to listen that he was a childhood buddy of the great man.

Drawing inspiration and hellish fumes from his massive pipe brimming with prohibited weed, the old Trotskyist narrated how he used to hunt rabbits from the suburban bush of Agugu all the way to the thick forests of Omi-Adio with the great journalist as his adjutant. “He was great with the catapult and he could take down a bird from a mile”, the old crank sulked.

Oyebola was one of the glorious early products of the Babatunde Jose visionary scheme of graduate recruitment which revolutionized the profession of journalism from the late sixties. Learning the rope very fast, the Ibadan-born textbook author quickly transformed from a classroom teacher to a popular pen pusher.

Yet in an irony of ironies, it was his subsequent career that would test Jose’s vision to the limits of its wisdom and practicality. Must the editor be a reclining intellectual and retreating scholar like Oyebola, or a massively connected, intrepid newshound and a man of urban ubiquity like Segun Osoba? Ideally, it ought to be a subtle combination of the two. But the actual world is far from an ideal place.

In the turmoil that followed the Murtala coup in July, 1975, Oyebola was nowhere to be found and Jose promptly plumped for Osoba who was at his inspired and swashbuckling best, sparking off a historic fire fight in Daily Times which would critically affect the career of some of the nation’s best and brightest journalists. Jose himself, at the age of fifty, would opt for diplomatic retirement having been critically wounded in the nasty melee.

It would appear that Oyebola never made a full recovery from the traumatic fiasco. He shunned the limelight and maintained an aloof dignity from politics and everything political concentrating instead on his publishing ventures. Yet he remained a man of calm introspection and considerable intellectual verve. The plight of the Black person brought out the fiery polemicist in him. Nigeria has lost a great pan Africanist. May his soul rest in peace.

The Nation